Year 4 Science Planning

This term Amanda Wilson is taking the Year 4 group. The unit started with a pre-test. The first lesson started with the learning outcome being written on the board. Students were instructed that the outcome was written and then asked to determine how they would learn this and what would they need to do to get there?

At the end of the unit are the students going to be able to tell someone what they learnt or are they going to be able to talk about the skills, about how they learnt it? The skills are equally as important. For example, if the students know what a good questions is the students don't need to learn that again. However, if they need to learn how to ask a good question then that forms some of the teaching sequence. Are the students able to articulate the skills of what they can do in the unit? We need to report on the skills as well as the content. It needs to be very clear in the program the teaching of skills to enable teachers that source this unit off the web.

So how do we write that? In the first column of the planning proforma 'the students will be able to' is where its documented. For example the students were to write the information in a retrieval chart. In the 'students will be able to' column you would put the students will identify key words/questions..
Another way to articulate a skills is 'students will be able to suggest ways to plan and conduct investigations'
A 'big question' will be added to guide and direct learning. Why is it important to a Year 4 student?


Work Samples

The achievement standards and the reporting part of what we are doing. After you have decided what you are looking at then those annotations relate back to that achievement standard. Most are really related to the content but some can relate the process. For a work sample, the question was posed about annotating work samples that are produced as a video.